St Helena Island is located in Queensland, Australia, 21 kilometers east of Brisbane and 4 kilometers east of the mouth of the Brisbane River in Moreton Bay. Originally used as a prison, it has now been transformed into a national park. In the 19th century, St Helena Island was a quarantine station that became one of the most profitable prisons in Queensland's history. The island was used to house prisoners and staff for 65 years. Many of those involved in the 1891 Australian shearers' strike were imprisoned there alongside murderers and bushrangers.

For more than 60 years, starting from 1867, St Helena Island was a place of confinement for many hundreds of society's outcasts, as it housed the main male prison of colonial Queensland. In the early 1860s, as Brisbane's Petrie Terrace prison became increasingly overcrowded, about 30 prisoners were transferred to an old vessel named "Proserpine," anchored near the mouth of the Brisbane River. In 1866, as part of their work, prisoners were ferried each morning by a whaleboat across the waters of Moreton Bay to St Helena Island. There, they were forced to dig wells, clear shrubbery, quarry stone, and build facilities for the new quarantine station. Each night they were returned to the "hulk."

The government's plans to build a quarantine station were canceled later that year—because conditions at the Petrie Terrace prison had become so unbearable, the prisoners from the "Proserpine" were instead sent to construct the prison. On May 14, 1867, the Governor of Queensland signed a proclamation declaring the island "a place where offenders sentenced to hard labor or penal servitude may be kept." In the following years, St Helena Island was to become Queensland's main prison.

The hardest years on St Helena Island were undoubtedly the early ones, and the ruins on the island testify to the hard labor prisoners had to endure. These were also years of harsh punishments—lashes, dreadful dark underground cells, gags in the mouth, and exhausting drill exercises. It was during these years that St Helena Island earned the fearsome reputation of the "hellhole of the Pacific" and "Queensland's hell." But such harsh measures were applied because St Helena Island housed some of the country's most dangerous criminals. For example, in 1891 there were 17 murderers, 27 men convicted of manslaughter, 26 men convicted of stabbing and shooting, and countless others responsible for assaults, rapes, and similar violent crimes.

Because of this, St Helena Island was meant to be a secure prison—and it was, thanks to its isolation and iron rule. During its existence, prisoners made fewer than 25 serious escape attempts. Most of the approximately 50 people involved in these attempts were caught, although three vanished without a trace, two drowned or were taken by sharks in Moreton Bay, and several were caught years later.

By the turn of the century, the facility on St Helena Island had expanded to accommodate more than 300 prisoners in a labyrinth of buildings surrounded by a high palisade wall. It functioned as a self-sufficient settlement and even exported some of its products to the mainland, including bricks for many Brisbane buildings, clothing for sale in Brisbane, and white rope for ships made from imported sisal hemp plants. In workshops on the island, prisoners were trained in trades such as carpentry, bootmaking, tailoring, tinsmithing, saddle making, bread baking, and meat cutting. The island boasted an award-winning dairy herd that received numerous prizes at Brisbane exhibitions. The island was actively farmed, especially in the prison's later years. Corn, potatoes, alfalfa, and other vegetables thrived in the rich volcanic soil, and by 1880 the sugar mill processed more than 75 tons of local sugar annually. In many ways, St Helena Island was considered a model prison of its time and was highly regarded by visiting penologists from other states and overseas.

By the 1920s, the prison began to show its age. In later years, after most prisoners and workshops were moved to Boggo Road Prison on the mainland, the island became a prison farm for the faithful, where several dozen local prisoners diligently dismantled the aging buildings. Many prison buildings have survived. The last prisoner left the island on February 15, 1933. The last prison superintendent was Mr. Patrick Roche. "It is impossible," wrote a visiting judge in 1869, "for prisoners to escape from St Helena Island. I am convinced of this. They would have to swim three miles." In fact, history was to show that the island was almost impregnable to escape.

Over six decades, more than 50 prisoners were desperate enough to attempt escape, but despite several superhuman efforts, their attempts were futile.

Several tried swimming. They were doomed to fail because of dangers posed by tides, coastal winds, rough seas, and sharks. Some swam on crudely built rafts made of planks and logs. One man tied a door to two pine stools. They even tried a bathtub. One pair planned to swim across the bay on two horses with themselves as passengers. They were stopped by a vigilant guard.

Then there were those who took to boats. One seized a whaleboat after throwing a guard into the water. Others found boats that had broken free from mainland docks and slipped unnoticed across the bay into the mangroves of St Helena Island. A third group tried to break into the prison boat shed. Several prisoners died in this attempt. An Aboriginal man from Burketown, Peter, desperately clinging to a wooden target used by guards during rifle practice, disappeared beneath the waters of Moreton Bay when his homemade raft drifted out to sea with the ebbing tide.

One of the most notorious episodes at the island prison occurred in November 1911 when prisoners Henry Craig and David McIntyre disappeared for almost two weeks. Most people believed they had escaped to the mainland, and as a result, searches were conducted throughout southeast Queensland. Guards searched St Helena Island from end to end daily. Police and "black trackers" patrolled hundreds of kilometers of mainland coastline. On the twelfth day, the prisoners reappeared. They had been hiding under the ceiling of the tailor's workshop on St Helena Island, where an inmate accomplice supplied them daily with food and water.

However, most escapees rarely got beyond the mangroves and scrub of the island, where they were caught by search guards, supplemented when necessary by Brisbane police, or driven back by hunger or unbearable swarms of mosquitoes. In fact, only one person was not caught after escaping from the island prison. The notorious shooter Charles Leslie was taken off the island early one morning in 1924 by the criminal's accomplices waiting for him at the shore in a motorboat.

Today, the island is a tourist destination for both schoolchildren and visitors to Brisbane.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Helena_Island_National_Park